Homelessness is a challenging and fascinating area of public policy; it is new, very complex, poorly defined and poorly understood. From the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, chronic homelessness was growing throughout Canada, yet federal and provincial governments failed to respond to it in any meaningful way. In the absence of federal or provincial leadership, local groups across the country have come together to fight against what was increasingly called a crisis of homelessness.
The scale of chronic homelessness is very similar in big cities across Canada, yet facing the same problem, local actors in Canada’s four biggest and most important cities – Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal – came together to form different models of governance of homelessness. In other words, there are very different producers of social protection for the chronically homeless, the other 1%, in each of these cities.
There are two main differences in the local governance models: the role of the local government and the centralization or fragmentation of the model. In Vancouver and Toronto, the local government is highly involved in governing homelessness and has made significant political and financial investments, whereas in Montreal and Calgary the local government plays a much smaller role. Further, the governance of homelessness is centralized in one single body or agency in Calgary and Toronto, whereas it is divided among a number of actors in Vancouver and Montreal. I ask what explains these very different models of governance of homelessness, and I consider the theoretical and practical consequences this has for social protection in Canada.
I conclude that the role of the local government in the governing coalition is determined by its housing related powers and the local political commitment to homelessness. In Vancouver and Toronto, there are either significant local housing related powers, a strong political commitment to homelessness, or both. In Montreal and Calgary, there are comparatively few housing related powers and the political commitment to the issue is relatively weak.
The fragmentation or centralization of the governing coalition is determined by the organization of local social forces in each city. In Vancouver and Montreal local social forces are strong and organized, but divided, making the governance of homelessness fragmented. In Calgary, local social forces are dominated by the private sector whereas in Toronto, local social forces are poorly organized and the city is a strong and somewhat domineering actor. This explains the centralization of the governance of homelessness in these two cities.
Despite their commitment and creativity, none of the local governance models has been successful at significantly reducing homelessness. No one level of government alone can solve homelessness, and the absence of the federal government from policy discussions regarding housing and homelessness has been enough to limit the local level successes.
These conclusions both confirm and challenge existing theories of welfare state. On the one hand, it confirms the argument that the evolution of the welfare state has mirrored the evolution of federalism, and that there is increasingly a new human or social capital paradigm of social policy. It challenges this literature, however, by highlighting the role that is played by the local level in the production of social protection. Studies of homelessness and the welfare state should pay careful attention not just to federal and provincial governments, but to the local level as well.